Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology
In: The Oxford literary review: OLR ; critical analyses of literary, philosophical political and psychoanalytic theory, Band 32, Heft 1, S. 1-17
ISSN: 1757-1634
The further scholarship investigates life forms (ecology, evolutionary biology and microbiology) the less those forms can be said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. The further scholarship delves into texts (deconstruction) the less they too can be said to have a single, independent and lasting identity. This similarity is not simply an analogy. Life forms cannot be said to differ in a rigorous way from texts. On many levels and for many reasons, deconstruction and ecology should talk to one another. It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 395–396)